NASA taps Boulder's Ball Aerospace for upcoming TEMPO mission

Boulder-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies will help build a space-based instrument for NASA to monitor air pollutants across North America, officials announced Monday.

NASA selected Ball Aerospace as a member of its Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution mission. The TEMPO mission is aimed at tracking ozone, aerosols and other trace gases over North America to gauge how pollution affects climate change and air quality.

The TEMPO team, led by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, will build a geostationary ultraviolet-visible spectrometer, officials said. Completion of the TEMPO instrument is scheduled for September 2017.

TEMPO is expected to launch as a hosted payload on a commercial communications satellite. The mission costs -- excluding the launch vehicle and expenses related to integration with the satellite -- will be capped at $90 million, officials said.

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